


Birthday

by Perosha



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Angst, Gen, Human Experimentation, Post-Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 23:22:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7821304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perosha/pseuds/Perosha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Post-BbS] Lea only wants one thing for his 15th birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birthday

It was probably his birthday today.

He couldn’t be sure, but the longer he stared at the tiny marks he’d made in the wall, the more he convinced himself it was true. After about the third day he’d started scratching the wall with a button whenever he woke from sleep, trying to keep track of time, and if he’d counted right, then it had been just over two weeks since they’d been caught trespassing. He was fifteen today, if it was day outside somewhere. He had no way of knowing.

The empty cell was narrow, so that sitting with his back to the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him, his sneakers almost touched the wall opposite. The diamond-shaped window in the door was too high up for him to see out of while sitting like this, but it still splashed a column of harsh light against the back wall of the cell, cut into strips by the metal bars set vertically into the window. Why there were bars on the window was a mystery to Lea. Even without them, the window was too small to try and escape through.

He studied the tally marks on the wall beside him again, running his fingers over the shallow grooves, counting them by feel to double-check the math.

Fifteen. Finally old enough to get a job after school so that he could have more pocket change than his allowance. Old enough to smoke, according to his brother. Maybe his brother had come back to town today to surprise him with a visit, like he’d done last year. Maybe he was helping their parents put up posters of Lea around town.

A noise in the hallway made Lea sit up straighter, suddenly alert, even though the sound had been almost nothing: the distant echo of footsteps, maybe. But it was the first break in the silence since yesterday or the day before, and he winced as he dragged himself to his feet, leaning against the door to stave off dizziness born of hunger. They didn’t feed him much, and only intermittently. He closed his eyes to steady himself, pressing his forehead to the cold metal door, willing his legs to keep him upright as he peered through the bars of the cell.

At first glance the corridor looked empty. All Lea could see was the sterile white walls and polished black floor, and the closed door of the cell directly across from his, crisscrossed with chains making an X. Then he realized someone was coming, their footfalls faint but measured, stopping every few seconds before moving on. Lea pressed his face to the bars at an angle to gaze up the corridor, watching.

It was the boy.

It was hard to tell his age, though Lea had tried before. Ten, maybe? Too small to fill out the lab coat he wore, even though it had clearly been altered to suit him. The sleeves of it had been rolled up, but still fell halfway down his hands as he reached out and tapped out a sequence on the keypad of a cell diagonally across from Lea’s. The keypad beeped, and a light on it switched from yellow to green. He moved to the cell opposite Lea’s, reaching up for the keypad.

“Hey,” Lea croaked.

His voice had long since gone hoarse, first from shouting and then from screaming and then from disuse. He swallowed, running his tongue over his teeth, trying to moisten his dehydrated mouth.

“Hey, kid…”

The boy turned. His hair was cut so that only one blue eye was visible, and try as he might, Lea could not read any particular reaction in it. The boy’s expression was passive, calculatedly blank. Lea forced out more words.

“Is Isa still down here?”

The boy only stared. Lea wondered whether he could even see him, hidden as he was in the confines of the cell. Maybe to the boy he was just a raspy voice emanating from the darkness behind the chained-up door.

“Isa,” he tried again. “My friend who came with me. You remember him, right?”

The boy said nothing. Lea had never heard him speak, but supposed he must from time to time. Surely he had to? The man with the golden eyes acted like he did.

“I just wanna know if he’s alive.” Lea managed a strained expression akin to a smile. “You can tell me that, right? Just a little favor.”

The boy said nothing. He looked from Lea’s cell up the corridor and back, and if he felt anything, Lea could not tell what it was. Lea clutched the cell bars tighter, pressing his face to them.

“C’mon, pretty please?” He tried again to smile. “Just tell me real quick?”

The boy said nothing.

“Where’s Isa?”

The boy turned and walked away.

Lea tried to call after him, but his voice cracked and fell apart when he raised it, sending him into a fit of wheezing that dizzied him with its intensity. When he gathered himself and clambered back to his feet, the boy had gone, and Lea could not hear any trace of footsteps. But as far as he could see, more keypads had turned green. Green probably meant empty.

Two weeks ago, all the cells had been full.

Lea had panicked the first time he’d been taken to the labs, fearing every trauma conjured by the chemical taste in the air: scalpels and needles and stitches, perhaps. But when the sedative magic wore off and he half-woke on a gurney, there was no trace of injury on him, not a drop of blood. He woke again back in the cell, curled on his side, his face streaked with tears from a pain in his chest that was like sorrow had been compressed into something denser than lead, filling his heart full to bursting. He’d cried until his eyes ran dry, then cried until he passed out, and as he drifted in and out of consciousness he’d thought he’d felt the darkness of the cell around him come alive and lick hungrily at his edges.

He’d survived that, and survived every round of testing since. But he had reason lately to suspect that was uncommon. The prison block had gotten much quieter over time.

“It’s my birthday,” he said to the empty hallway.

Only his own voice echoed back to him, bouncing off of the walls and ceiling, drifting away down the corridor. He felt himself starting to tremble with the effort of standing, and tightened his grip on the cell bars, his knuckles whitening, locking his knees.

Once he’d watched as a woman was put into the cell across from his. She hadn’t said anything in response to his attempts at contact, and Lea had fallen asleep to the sound of her sobbing. Other noises woke him later—snarls, voices, a commotion outside her cell—and when the man with the golden eyes had unchained the door, the thing snarling in the darkness wasn’t a woman anymore. They killed it, but it did not bleed. It just dissolved into tendrils of living darkness that dissipated like smoke, leaving no trace that whoever she’d been had existed.

“It’s my birthday!” Lea called, louder but not loud. He didn’t have the strength to be loud. “You hear that, Isa? You’ve gotta get me a present!”

He refused to listen to the sterile silence.

“What, you forgot? No way! I’d never forget  _ your  _ birthday.” He trembled harder, a muscle spasming in his leg. “Never have, never since kindergarten. I’ve got it memorized.”

He pressed his face into the edge of the bars at an uncomfortable angle, the metal digging into his temple as he strained to see as far as he could up the harshly-lit hallway. He wasn’t sure how many cells there were exactly. Thirteen or fourteen. On the way back from a round in the labs, he was never in any condition to count.

“So...what’d you get me?” His shoulder began to ache from being jammed against the door; he ignored it. “C’mon, Isa, you can tell me. I know you can’t give it to me ‘til we get out of here.”

Not even footsteps, now. Only his own ghostly echoes.

“Nothing? Really?” His small laugh sounded like a wounded animal. “Okay, buddy. I’ll let it slide this one time. But you gotta give me another present, all right? Right—right now.”

Lea tightened his grip on the bars, holding himself upright. He had been standing too long, and knew he’d soon collapse. But talking out of the window was the only way his voice might reach the rest of the cells.

“You listening, Isa? You gotta do this one thing for me. For my birthday.” He swallowed again, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He was so thirsty. “You gotta say something.”

He waited. Nothing.

“Pretty easy, right? I’m really lettin’ you off the hook this year. Just...say something, and let me know you’re out there. That’s all I want. Honest.”

He waited.

“Isa? You alive?”

Nothing.

Lea started to sing.

“Happy birthday to me...Happy birthday to me…”

It was delirious, half-mad, his weak voice so cracked and strained that it sounded like a scratched record as he croaked the childish melody.

They’d have red velvet cake back home. They always did, for his birthday.

“Happy birthday, dear Leeeaaa…”

Lea tried to swallow, but he had no saliva left. Instead of cold silence, however, something else came to him: the shadow of another voice from the very furthest end of the corridor. Familiar, but faint, and so weak that Lea could only just barely distinguish the paper-thin words.

_ “Happy birthday...to...you…” _

Lea let go of the cell bars. Tears mingled with his laughter as he sank to his knees on the floor.


End file.
